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Sabine
1895: Fogg Lecture Hall Sabine's career is the story of the birth of the field of modern architectural acoustics. In 1895, acoustically improving the Fogg Lecture Hall, part of the recently constructed Fogg Art Museum, was considered an impossible task by the senior staff of the physics department at Harvard. The assignment was passed down until it landed on the shoulders of a young physics professor, Sabine. Although considered a popular lecturer by the students, Sabine had never received his Ph.D. and did not have any particular background dealing with sound. Sabine tackled the problem by trying to determine what made the Fogg Lecture Hall different from other, acoustically acceptable facilities. In particular, the Sanders Theater was considered acoustically excellent. For the next several years, Sabine and a group of assistants spent each night moving materials between the two lecture halls and testing the acoustics. On some nights they would borrow hundreds of seat cushions from the Sanders Theater. Using an organ pipe and a stopwatch, Sabine performed thousands of careful measurements (though inaccurate by present standards) of the time required for different frequencies of sounds to decay to inaudibility in the presence of the different materials. He tested reverberation time with several different types of Oriental rugs inside Fogg Lecture Hall, and with various numbers of people occupying its seats, and found that the body of an average person decreased reverberation time by about as much as six seat cushions. Once the measurements were taken and before morning arrived, everything was quickly replaced in both lecture halls, in order to be ready for classes the next day. Sabine was able to determine, through the experiments, that a definitive relationship exists between the quality of the acoustics, the size of the chamber, and the amount of absorption surface present. He formally defined the reverberation time, which is still the most important characteristic currently in use for gauging the acoustical quality of a room, as number of seconds required for the intensity of the sound to drop from the starting level, by an amount of 60 dB (decibels). 1898: Warehouse 13 After creating the formula behind acoustics, T=(V/A) x 0.161 s/m, he was contacted by Nikoli Tesla to aide him in building a personal firearm that used a less lethal projectile. While the two worked for sometime, tension came between the two when deciding what form of energy should be used. Tesla was a firm believer in electricity while Sabine wanted to remain in his element with sound. The two parted ways, but Sabine kept working on his device. When he finished it in 1918 and presented it to The Warehouse, he was downtrodden to find that Tesla had finished his device first and was the current sidearm of the Agents. Instead of being put into use, the gun was put into storage. Today: Warehouse Sabine Doppler Large 1.jpg|The Doppler-Sabine Rifle Sabine Doppler Large 2.jpg Sabine Shotgun.jpg|The Derham-Sabine Shotgun When the newest iteration of H.A.R.P. was assembled, The Warehouse was surprised to find that Teslas were in low supply, so they turned to the slightly 'newer' technology, the Sabine. Eventually, Claudia got permission to take a look at Sabine's original designs for the gun and made two other variants of the Sabine, the 'Doppler' sniper rifle variant capable of piercing steel, named after Christian Doppler, who described how the frequency of a sound wave changes in relation to a moving observer (the Doppler effect); and the 'Derham' Shotgun capable of firing at the mythical 'brown note', named after William Derham, who produced the earliest accurate estimate of the speed of sound. Before the Dopplar and Derham, only Bri Rependata and Matt Sordens wielded one, but after helping Bri, Nikki, and Tyler collect the unreleased NERF Max Force blasters, Sandy Calecer was given one of his choice. Category:Gadget Category:Sound Artifacts Category:Affectos